Russian literature, reform, and revolution have forever been intertwined. The sheer size of Russia, its brutal climate, the violence of its history, and the heroism and genius of its people all have contributed to a world of literature like no other. “Russia’s Open Book: Writing in the Age of Putin” – a co-production with Wilton Films – explores that spellbinding literary culture and history. Throughout we ask, where is the new Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, or Gogol, waiting to be discovered by the English-speaking world? Hosted by author and actor Stephen Fry.
Watch NowINT. Productions
Television, films, and video produced in close association with universities, libraries, publishers, and museums — including the American Historical Association, the Library of America, the New-York Historical Society, Columbia University, and many others
Harlem
Harlem occupies a unique place in the imagination of black America and the rest of the world. Harlem’s legendary history embodies the struggle for African-American equality. Its role as the cultural capital of black America, giving birth to art, literature, music, ideas, and politics, has influenced the lives and minds of millions of people worldwide.
It is a place on an island in a city, centered around its main artery of New York’s 125th Street. Yet as David Levering Lewis, one of its greatest historians, has written, Harlem is, was, and will always be as well a “place in the mind”—a “construct of culture”—“to be encountered in brownstones near Howard University in Washington, faculty houses on the Fisk University campus in Nashville, the Algonquin Hotel dining room, or on the left bank of the Seine.”
Watch NowThe Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War
The Korean War lasted three years, killed 35,000 Americans and 3 million Koreans, and involved the armed forces of 16 countries. It was the first hot war in the American battle against communism and almost careened into worldwide nuclear conflagration. It pitted commanders in the field against commanders in the White House, and many so-called “great men” of history—Truman, MacArthur, Mao, Stalin—against each other.
“The Coldest Winter” tells the story of the Korean War based on the last work of history from Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Halberstam. The film, like the book, is based on interviews with American, Korean, and Chinese veterans, politicians, journalists, and other eyewitnesses, and on the raw materials recorded in their wartime notebooks, letters home, published and unpublished memoirs, photos and films. A co-production with Jigsaw Films.
Watch NowHitler’s Museum
The Linz Museum was among the strangest of Hitler’s criminal ambitions, envisioned to become the Nazis’ Smithsonian Institution: a Louvre for the 1,000-Year Reich. A colossal art museum created to house the world’s greatest Aryan cultural achievements, this campus of buildings in Linz was planned to hold works by all of the great masters of Europe that the Nazis bought and seized during the occupation of Europe. Under Hitler’s direct command, Special Commission agents stationed in France, Holland, Belgium, Italy, Czechoslovakia, and Poland systematically acquired more than 10,000 art objects, objects that, in turn, were shipped on to Germany and Austria for wartime storage in castles and deep underground mines that had been converted for the purpose. This documentary tells the full tale of this plan for the first time. Such was Hitler’s attachment to the project that when he committed suicide in Berlin in April 1945, the scale model of the museum was there, underground in the bunker, next to him.
American Foreign Policy: A Video History
Intelligent Television is mobilizing new assets for the teaching and study of American foreign policy, assembling and producing new and archival moving image and recorded sound assets into a rich and openly available repository to help make the teaching and study of U.S. foreign policy more engaging for university students in the age of YouTube, Facebook, iTunes, and Twitter.
The South
Intelligent Television, Insignia Films, and PBS are producing an epic television and education project on the history of the American South in the 20th century.
Such an initiative is long overdue. Southerners of every era have believed that the worlds of their youth and the cultures of their region are vanishing. Indeed, the urgency behind “The South” becomes stronger with each Southerner’s death. Ray Charles, Johnny Cash, and June Carter Cash, with their diverse backgrounds in Southern music, are now gone. Strom Thurmond and David Brinkley, with their divergent views of Southern politics, are gone. Dale Earnhardt of North Carolina and Willie Morris of Mississippi are gone. Rosa Parks and Coretta Scott King have passed into history. “The South” must move quickly to collect, archive, and convey their history and legacies.
Watch NowD-Day and the Crowd
In 1943, the U.K. government broadcast a radio and print appeal to British citizens, urging them to send photographs, postcards, and images taken before the war depicting the coastline of continental Europe. Citizens responded—millions of photographs were mailed and delivered to the War Office.
INT researchers recently found this collection lying in thousands of boxes in one of the world’s great museums. The U.S. and U.K. governments used these images in war-planning for the June 1944 D-Day invasion. This documentary shows how, for “Operation Overlord,” hundreds of servicemen and servicewomen hand-coded and tagged these images with longitude and latitude and other geographical information, effectively taking millions of pieces of information crowd-sourced from the public and making them into critical intelligence that helped to turn the tide of the war.
Within the Law
“Within the Law” is recreating a lost 1917 feature film.
Over 50 percent of early American cinema is lost—destroyed for one reason or another—-and with it has vanished much of early 20th-century American history, culture, and society. This project invites viewers to participate in the reconstruction of an early silent film based on the film’s surviving clues—the Broadway play it was based on, the musical score (recently discovered) that was composed specifically for it, contemporary press reviews, production stills, and other films from its once-vibrant production company, Brooklyn-based Vitagraph Studios.
For further information about Intelligent Television projects and productions, or to get involved, please contact the company.